


now, i’ve read some books and i’ve grown quite brave

by aceofdiamonds



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 05:45:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1334257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aceofdiamonds/pseuds/aceofdiamonds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>books have been a constant in hermione’s life, an escape into far-off lands with dragons and princesses when real life was just too boring. then she gets accepted into hogwarts and look, she's living these stories now, she's got her own adventures -- without the princesses. there's none of those.</p>
            </blockquote>





	now, i’ve read some books and i’ve grown quite brave

**Author's Note:**

> this was inspired by the post going around tumblr that i can't find right now to link. the one with imagine six year old hermione reading all about matilda and her telekinesis and then she puts down her book and tries it for herself and it works! she's magic too! i found the title on tumblr somewhere too. i don't own these books or the characters mentioned

When Hermione is three her mum takes her to the library to get her first library card. She's allowed four books and she takes half an hour to choose one about a whale, one about a sleepy boy, and one about magic, and when she's made her very final decision she carries them home in the little bag the librarian with the nice smile gives her. 

For her sixth birthday her parents give her a stack of books so big she needs two hands to hold them. She holds them close to her chest and keeps them in a little stack beside her bed. 

Her favourite author -- that's the person who makes up these wonderful stories; she already knows what she wants to be when she grows up -- is Roald Dahl. She's read seven of his books so far and she's just about to start _Matilda_. Matilda is about a very smart girl who comes from a horrible family but one day she discovers she can use her brain _to make things move_. When she finishes the book, when Matilda goes to live with the lovely Miss Honey, Hermione places it on the bed beside her and concentrates very hard on the tiny rabbit ornament across the room. She screws up her nose and thinks and thinks and then _the rabbit moves along the shelf_. She claps her hands and falls asleep with a huge smile on her face because even though she loves her mum and dad very much she wants to be just like Matilda. 

When she's eight she devours all the Jacqueline Wilson books she can get her hands on. She thinks her favourite might be _The Bed and Breakfast Star_ where a girl lives in all different hotels. Hermione stayed in a hotel last summer when they went to France on holiday. The hotel had a little fridge in a cupboard and she had a huge double bed all to herself and when she looked out the window she could see way out across the ocean.

On her eleventh birthday a lady knocks on the Grangers' door and tells Hermione she's a witch and that there's a school in Scotland called Hogwarts where they will teach her all about magic and how to use it properly. To prove it, because her mum and dad are quite logical people and don't see how this can be true, the lady turns into a cat and back again right in the middle of Hermione's living room but Hermione already believes her because of the Matilda Incident when she was seven and also because last month she made a flower change from pink to blue just by stroking one of its petals. 

She goes to London with her parents to a crowded little street full of people in pointed hats and carrying boxes and bags with little vials and animals spilling out. The bank is run by goblins who have to teach her all the different coins -- the big one the size of her fist is a Galleon, the silver one is called a Sickle, and the little tiny ones that she stacks up on the counter beside her mum’s elbow are Knuts. The books she gets are not just full of spells but there’re all plenty of those, all full of strange new words and funny like jinxes like one that makes someone's legs turn to jelly and exactly how to flick your wand. There's history books, too, and potion recipes, and lists of different creatures from all over the world. She reads them all twice and then reads the one about the school, _Hogwarts: A History_ , again and again. A huge bubble of excitement fills up inside of her and stays there all year until September 1st. 

When September 1st finally comes around she gets up at half past six to check her trunk, then to check it another three times before they leave. She has all of her new books stacked piled neatly beside her new tie and her favourite cardigan. Her dad is herding them out the door when she stops with a shriek and hurtles up the stairs to the bookcase in the corner of her room. _The Bed and Breakfast Star_ is pushed in beside _The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1_ ; she holds _The Secret Garden_ all the way to London, reading the chapter where the flowers first begin to grow as they pull into King’s Cross.

The first person she talks to after her goodbyes and hugs and promises to write is Neville Longbottom. His face is scared but his voice is kind and he doesn’t know it but he helps calm her nerves a little. She’s scared, see. Scared that books just won’t be enough. Scared because all of these other people have magical parents and hers are dentists.

She gets sorted into Gryffindor: the house of courage and bravery after so many minutes under the hat she had started to fidget. The other girls in her dormitory are nice enough, she thinks. They just don't really seem her type. That night she curls up in her new four-poster bed, just like the ones she's always read about in her boarding school books, and tries not to cry above the noise of two of her new roommates laughing in the beds beside her.

She's read about new schools and homesickness and how to make friends but it's different putting it into practice. She worried so much about not knowing enough about magic she didn't stop to think about everything else that could go wrong.

Mountain trolls, she finds, are an extra-special way of making friends.

When she turns thirteen she's realised she's not as bad as she once was at making friends. She's got Harry, that famous Harry Potter who was in all of her history books for defeating the most evil dark wizard of all time when he was a baby, and she's got Ron, funny, thinks before he talks, loyal Ron. With these two, she's set. For her thirteenth birthday her parents give her some money and tell her she can buy whatever she wants. It's the first year she hasn't been given any books. She wonders if this is growing up.

Books taught her nothing about falling in love she realises when she watches one of her best friends walk away from her leaving her heart bruised and forgotten. She could hope for a happy ending but there’s other more important things she should be wishing for so she pushes ginger hair and an open laugh to the back of her head and goes back to studying.

The year she turns sixteen she doesn’t need the excitement and adventures from stories anymore because she’s right in the middle of them, she's living those stories. Her best friend fought a dragon last year and now, in sort of unrelated circumstances, he’s got the weight of the world on his shoulders because there’s a battle of good and evil going on and Harry is in the centre. She didn’t think people like that existed in real life, the unsuspecting hero and the evil villain who tears his soul in half over and over again to cling on to life, but the wizarding world, the Ministry of Magic, everyone is panicked and why would they be if it wasn’t real?

If only nine year old Hermione could see her now.

Books used to be for enjoyment, to let her escape into far-off lands with dragons and castles when real life was too boring, but now she reads frantically, turning page after page searching for anything that might help them survive. See, Harry’s the leader. That’s the way it always has been and it’s the way it works best. He’s the one with the instinct and the strength and the bravery to get them through everything. He’s the one who gets everyone’s support, who people are fighting for. Then there’s Ron. She thinks he’s the heart behind the three of them and that’s not just her own talking. He tells it how it is, sometimes hurtfully but sometimes helpfully, and is led by his emotions in ways that Harry and Hermione have worked to hide. That leaves the books to Hermione. She’s an okay witch -- alright, she’s so much more than okay --, but books are where it all started for her and they’re still her first port of call when everything falls apart.

She’s discovering again, like she did back when she was eleven and new to this whole world, that books can only take her so far. They can teach her the best spells to use and what creature is what but they can’t fight the Death Eater trying to kill her and they can’t tell her how to stop herself from falling apart when Ron leaves and she has to support Harry and herself through tents and giant snakes disguised as old women.

They’ve helped her get this far but it’s up to her now. If she wants to help win this thing, for her family, for the students of Hogwarts, for Harry and for Ron, she needs to put the books down and _fight_.

(When it's all over, when too many people have been lost and Voldemort is dead, the three of them move into a little flat in the middle of London with a room full of books from floor to ceiling. When they've stopped thanking each other every day for being alive and they can stand to be out of one another's sight for more than ten minutes, Hermione slips into the enlarged room at the back of the flat and sinks into the chair in the corner and picks a book off the shelf beside her at random, biting her lip to hold in the laugh because it's _The Lord of the Rings_ and now it's time to read someone else's adventure, she's had her share.)

 

  



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